Take care while using toothpick. In my case it did break and I had to remove the broken part with help of pin but of course after switcing off the phone and remove the battery. Please be careful. Good luck.

Amazing...it worked. Tried the toothpick, but did not want to pry to hard...did not work. Then tried plastic pick to clean connections...did not work. Then used my wife's cutical tool to pry up..and it works.
Silly Samsung.

Reading the solution to fiddle with the connector using the toothpick, I just changed the cable and it worked. I had a cable plugged in to a USB port all the time for charging and for remote storage access (photos) but all the sudden it stopped letting me connect to my phone's storage but the phone still showed as "charging". Changing the cable lets me do both again. Putting the old cable back on and I get the USB device not recognized message again but the phone starts to charge.

This is because your device is connecting to the laptop as a "media device". This is changed easily by (after connecting your USB cable to the PC and the phone) pulling down the notification bar from the top of the screen (the black bar at topmost with small icons on it for new users). The first entry should see is called "Ongoing"and it tells you how the device is connected to the PC (either as a camera or a media device-you can activate (by touching) either the camera optionif you want to access your files or the media option if you want to play music or videos on your computer directly.
Lastly, depending on how you use your camera in between USB connection times you would have to do this again if your device is not recognised the next time you plug it in (because sometimes when it's on a wireless network the device automatically switches back to media device)
please post back if this helps
Mario